SOURCE: "Reader-Oriented Criticism and Television," in Discourse: Contemporary Criticism, University of North Carolina Press, 1987, pp. 74-112.

[In the following essay, Allen applies the phenomenological theory of reader-oriented criticism to the viewing of television. ]

"Reader-response criticism," "reception theory," and "reader-oriented criticism" are all names given to the variety of recent works in literary studies that foreground the role of the reader in understanding and deriving pleasure from literary texts. Traditionally, says Wolfgang Iser, a leading force in the German variant of reader-oriented studies, critics have regarded the literary text as something that possesses meaning much in the way that an oriental carpet possesses a pattern. Thus critics saw their task as finding the "figure in the carpet"—the meaning of the work that lay hidden in its structure—and relating that meaning to other readers who had not discovered it for themselves (or who did not possess the interpretative gifts of the critic).

To Iser, the presumptions of traditional literary criticism render the entire critical enterprise little more than intellectual strip mining: the critic plows through the text looking for signs of hidden meaning. When all the bits of meaning have been extracted from the textual site, the critic displays them before a suitably grateful public and then moves on to mine another text. Iser sees such an approach to criticism as fatal both for literature and for criticism, because if meaning is something that can be extracted from a text like coal from a hillside, then the act of criticism reduces literature to a pile of "used-up" texts about which there is nothing left to be said.¹

Iser's attack on this "archeological approach" to criticism is directed at its most basic underlying assumption: that meaning is, to use Thomas Carlyle's phrase, an "open secret" waiting to be found by the insightful critic and reader. Whether the critic then ascribes that found meaning to the intention of the author, the author's unconscious motives, the "spirit" of an age, or the relationships among formal elements in the text, meaning nevertheless is seen to exist "out there," in the text, independent of the mind of the critic or reader.

All of the critics whose work I am lumping together under the category of reader-oriented criticism share with Iser the fundamental belief that this schema ignores a crucial fact of literature—namely, that works are made to mean through the process of reading. Although they disagree about many other things, literary critics and theorists as diverse as Iser, Roman Ingarden, Georges Poulet, Mikel Dufrenne, Hans Robert Jauss, Stanley Fish, Norman Holland, Jonathan Culler, and Tony Bennett would agree that literary meaning should no longer be viewed as an immutable property of a text but must be considered as the result of the confrontation between reading act and textual structure. In other words, for reader-oriented critics, what previous critics took for granted has become the central focus of critical investigation: what happens when we read a fictional narrative?

The common-sense observation that meaning does not occur except through the reading act has given rise not so much to a single approach to literature (and by extension to film, television, and other forms of cultural production) as to a field of inquiry. Critics and theorists I would call reader-oriented sometimes share little more than a common starting point for their projects—an insistence upon admitting the reading act to the critical agenda. The questions that logically flow from this starting point have hardly been answered in a single voice, perhaps because they come so close to the heart of criticism and to our relationship with those curious other worlds we call literature, or film, or television. Rather than try to disentangle the many critical skeins that go into reader-oriented criticism as a prelude to demonstrating how they might be applied to television, I will organize my discussion of this approach around what I see to be a set of key questions—keys both to the project of reader-oriented approaches in general and to their possible application to television narratives. In doing so I will necessarily emphasize the work of a few critics over that of others and gloss over philosophical and methodological differences that the proponents of the various "schools" of readeroriented criticism delight in calling to each other's attention.² What is most important to the student of television is the phenomenon that reader-oriented criticism thrusts into the critical foreground—the reading act—and the questions, issues, and opportunities that arise when the text being read is televisual rather than literary or cinematic.

The organization of reader-oriented criticism around this central question might suggest that literary theorists did not concern themselves with it before the emergence of reader-oriented criticism in the 1960s. Like all critical approaches, however, reader-oriented criticism did not emerge from a philosophical vacuum. Despite the near irrelevance of this question for the "figure-in-the-carpet" tradition of criticism, it formed one focus of study for scholars within the branch of philosophy and literary theory called phenomenology decades before the publication of works by Iser and Jauss in the 1960s and 1970s.

Given its name by philosopher Edmund Husserl in the 1930s, phenomenology concerns itself with the relationship between the perceiving individual and the world of things, people, and actions that might be perceived. These are not two separate realms connected only by the passive sensory mechanisms of the individual, declared Husserl, but rather they are inextricably linked aspects of the process by which we know anything. All thought and perception involve mutually dependent subjects and objects. I cannot think but that I think of something. Thus to study any thing is to study that thing as it is experienced or conceptualized within the consciousness of a particular individual. Reality, in other words, has no meaning for us except as individually experienced phenomena.

Phenomenology provides the philosophical basis for the work of a number of literary theorists who have influenced reader-oriented criticism—Hans-Georg Gadamer, Roman Ingarden, the so-called Geneva School of criticism of the 1930s and 1940s—and directly informs much of contemporary reader-oriented criticism itself. For the above-mentioned scholars, reading the fictional narrative text provides an especially interesting case of the more general process by which subjects (individuals) take objects into their consciousness or "intend" them, to use Husserl's term. By "intend" Husserl means not so much "to want it to be like" (as in, "He intended that things should go well") as "to direct one's conscious sensory and sense-making capacities toward."

The phenomenologist's fascination with the act of reading lies in the curious and paradoxical process by which lifeless and pitifully inadequate words on a page are not just made to mean something through the intentions of the reader but are "brought to life" in that reader's imagination. This process occurs in reading the simplest fictional narrative (a joke, folktale, or anecdote) and in the most complex literary experience (slogging through Finnegans Wake, for example). It occurs so quickly and so automatically that it would appear to short-circuit conscious logic. The world constructed as a result of the reading act has existence only in the mind of the reader, and yet its construction is initiated and guided by words that exist "out there" on the page. Furthermore, those words on the page were "intended" (in both senses of the term) by another consciousness—that of the author who wrote them. Geneva School critic Georges Poulet, for example, describes the reading act as an acquiescence by the reader to the thoughts of another consciousness. "because of the strange invasion of my person by the thoughts of another, I am a self who is granted the experience of thinking thoughts foreign to him. I am the subject of thoughts other than my own."³

Obviously, the relationship between text and reader can be conceptualized in a number of ways—as a sort of mutually sustaining collaboration, a surrender to the thoughts of another, or even a battle of wills between the intentions of the reader and those of the author. The analogies differ according to the degree of determinancy each critic assigns the reader's intentional activity, the text, and the author's intentions. But let us take one conceptualization of the reading act and follow it through from its origins in phenomenological theory to its application to literature and television.

For Roman Ingarden, a student of Edmund Husserl, the literary text starts as an intentional act on the part of the author. Once the work has been written and published, however, it exists separately from those originating intentions. The analogy Ingarden uses is that of a musical composition. The musical text certainly has a material status as written notes on paper that have resulted from the composer's activity. At this point, however, the text is still only a set of possibilities. The musical text becomes a musical work only when a performer "concretizes" the text in performance. The text exists apart from any particular rendering of it, but the work has meaning for us only as a performance. Similarly the literary text for Ingarden is but a "schemata," a skeletal structure of meaning possibilities awaiting concretization by the reader's own intentional activity. In a very real sense, then, each reading is a performance of meaning.⁴

As words on the page, the literary text is but one-half of the perceptual dynamic; it is an object, yet without a perceiving subject. Or, seen another way, it is the material residue of an absent, intending subject—the author. In the reading act, the fictional world represented by the words on the page is rendered within the consciousness of the reader. That world is created as the reader follows the directions for meaning construction provided by the text, but even more importantly as the reader fills in the places the text leaves vacant.

This notion of reading as "gap filling" is extremely important to Ingarden and, indeed, to the entire project of reader-oriented criticism. It is an extension of the more general phenomenological theory of perception. In making sense of the world around us we intend things, concepts, actions—that is, we impose some sense of meaning upon experiences by directing our conscious faculties toward them. When the objects of our perceptions (and hence intentions) are "real" objects, the meanings we attach to them are to some degree limited by their material qualities. The cat sitting on my lap at the moment is not just any cat, but this small, purring, four-year-old, female tabby named Dorothy. Still, however, I can only perceive a few of the manifold aspects of this particular cat at any given moment. Looking down at her now, I see her as a rather indistinctly shaped mass of fur with no face, feet, or tail. I can pick her up and thus reveal these hidden aspects, but in doing so I necessarily obscure others. Nothing can be perceived in all its aspects at once, and we constantly make sense of the world by extrapolating from a small number of qualities to a whole thing.

The cats we experience in literary narratives, however, have no existence in the "real" world of things. They exist only as words on a page and thus are much more indeterminate than real cats. If, for example, I read in a story: "The man sat at his computer terminal with a sleeping cat on his lap," I as the reader of this tale can imagine all sorts of qualities this fictional cat might possess. The text, as it were, leaves it up to my intentions to specify whether it is male or female; black, yellow, or multicolored; friendly or temperamental; small or large; spayed or not; and so on. In fact, the text leaves it up to me to decide how determinate a cat I want to make it at all. I can quite legitimately construct or intend whatever kind of cat I like so long as my intentions do not contradict information the text gives me. No matter how elaborately the text describes this cat, the construction of it by the reader will always be a process of making a whole cat out of an incomplete set of cat descriptors by supplying the missing parts.

One of the amazing things about the worlds we construct in reading literature is that those worlds appear to us to be fully formed and complete from the time we get our first descriptions of them on page one until after we have finished reading the final paragraph of the book. Reading a novel is not like playing "connect the dots." We don't start with an apparently random arrangement of words that take on meaning and life only at the end of the reading process. To phenomenologists this experiencing of a narrative world as fully formed from the beginning provides evidence for the crucial role of intention in our negotiation of worlds, both textual and material. Even on the basis of the tiniest scrap of information, we will provide whatever is missing until we have organized our perceptual field into objects that make sense to us.

Gap filling is also affected by our movement through the text. The confrontation between our initial expectations and the text forms a sort of provisional fictional world, on the basis of which we develop further expectations of what is likely to happen next, as well as assumptions about the relationship between any one part of this fictional world and any other. As we read further, those expectations are modified in order that we can keep a coherent world before our mind's eye at all times. Furthermore, the text keeps shifting our perspective on this world—foregrounding this aspect in one chapter; that one later on. In short, Ingarden reminds us that reading is a dynamic tension between the reader's expectations and the text's schematic instructions for meaning production. The result is a constantly changing fictional world, but one that appears to us as whole and complete at any given moment during the reading act.

Ingarden's description of the reading act becomes the starting point for Wolfgang Iser's The Act of Reading.⁵ Iser points out that our relationship with narrative artworks is fundamentally different from that with painting or photography. A painting is available to us all at once. The only time we experience a novel or film as a whole, however, is when we have finished experiencing it—that is, when we are no longer reading it. Instead of being outside the work contemplating it as a whole, the reader of a narrative takes on what Iser calls a "wandering view-point": a constantly changing position within the text itself. Iser calls this relationship between dynamic reading activity and unfolding textual terrain "unique to literature." The photographic basis of the cinema (and, we may assume, television) gives it too much of an "all-at-onceness" at the level of the shot for Iser's taste. It is clear, however, that any narrative form involves the reader's (or viewer's) movement through the text, from one sentence, shot, or scene to the next.

As the term "wandering viewpoint" suggests, Iser's theory of the reading act emphasizes its diachronic (occurring over time) dimension. At every moment during the reading act, we are poised between the textual geography we have already wandered across and that we have yet to cover. This tension, between that which we have learned and that which we anticipate, occurs throughout the text and at every level of its organization. Each sentence of a literary narrative both answers questions and asks new ones.⁶ Iser describes this process as an alternation between protension (expectation or anticipation) and retention (our memory of the text to that point). Each sentence does not so much fulfill our expectations as it alters and channels them. To continue the geographic metaphor, each new "block" of text we cover provides us with a new vantage point from which to regard the landscape of the text thus far, while, at the same time, it causes us to speculate as to what lies around the next textual corner. Hence our viewpoint constantly "wanders" backwards and forwards across the text.

According to Iser, although the text can stimulate and to some degree channel protension and retention, it cannot control those processes. This is because protension and retention occur in the places where the text is silent—in the inevitable gaps between sentences, paragraphs, and chapters. It is in these holes in the textual structure that we as readers "work" on that structure. We make the connections that the text cannot make for us.

Iser's theory of reading activity as gap filling relies upon a basic semiotic distinction—discussed in Ellen Setter's essay—between paradigmatic (associative) and syntagmatic (sequential) organization. (Perhaps the easiest way to keep straight the difference between paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes of textual organization is to think of them as the principles by which a restaurant menu is organized. Items are arranged paradigmatically, with all those having a basic affinity grouped together: appetizers with appetizers, entrées with entrées, desserts with desserts. The menu is also arranged syntagmatically according to the sequence of dishes in an ordinary meal: appetizers appear first, then soups, then fish dishes, then entrées, then desserts, etc.) The gaps Iser speaks of in the text involve the syntagmatic arrangement of textual segments—the space between one chapter and the next, for example. These gaps provide us with an opportunity to consider possible paradigmatic relationships between them as well—how might one be related to the other conceptually?

Underlying Iser's account of the reading activity is the notion of "consistency-building," which derives from Ingarden and from phenomenology in general. The connections that readers make between textual segments are those that contribute to the maintenance of a coherent textual world. Again we have the idea that, faced with an ambiguous, unconnected, or even seemingly random set of sensory experiences, we will impose some sort of coherence and order upon them. Because the fictional narrative gives us no material points of reference by which to order its world, we are continually adjusting our picture of it to fit with new information the text presents us. On the other hand, we tend to foreground that new information that fits most easily into our existing view of the text's world (our Gestalt) and leave on the periphery of our attention elements that cannot immediately be correlated with that which we already know. It is at the level of our totalizing view of the text's world, its Gestalt, that a text has meaning for us. And because this Gestalt is imposed by the reader upon the structure of the text, it is only in the mind of the reader that a text becomes a work of literature.⁷

It is obvious from the above discussion that Iser limits his theory of the reading act to literature. In fact, as I have suggested, he seems to regard the process by which we understand films and television as inherently different. We should also note that, although the fundamentals of the reading process Iser outlines should be applicable to the experience of reading any type of fictional narrative, Iser's examples are drawn almost exclusively from "highart" literature—Pilgrim's Progress, Ulysses, Tristram Shandy. Thus, Iser himself might be horrified at the prospect of someone applying his theory of reading not just to television, but to one of the most popular and least "artsy" of television narrative forms—the soap opera. Yet this is precisely what I propose to do. I believe that, regardless of the range of texts to which it was intended to be applied, the phenomenological theory of reading activity developed by Ingarden and elaborated by Iser helps to account for the relationship between soap opera viewers and the curiously structured and quite complex fictional worlds they encounter daily. (I am tempted to say it provides a guiding light into another world, but I won't.) Furthermore, given that some aspects of "reading" soap operas overlap with the processes involved in reading any narrative broadcast on commercial television, a reader-oriented account of the relationship between soap operas and their viewers might help us to understand our relationship with television narratives more generally.

Several things immediately strike us about the soap opera as a narrative structure. The first is the staggeringly large amount of text devoted, ostensibly at least, to the relating of the same story. Each year an hour-long soap opera offers its viewers 260 hours of text. Most of the soap operas currently being run on American commercial television have been on the air for at least ten years. In cinematic terms, this represents the equivalent of 1,300 feature-length films! Two soap operas, Guiding Light and Search for Tomorrow, have enjoyed continuous television runs since the early 1950s, giving them each texts that would take more than a year of nonstop viewing to "read."

Another distinctive feature of the soap opera text is its presumption of its own immortality. Although individual subplots are brought to temporary resolution, there is no point of final narrative closure toward which the soap opera narrative moves. Individual episodes advance the subplots incrementally, but no one watches a soap opera with the expectation that one day all of the conflicts and narrative entanglements will be resolved so that the entire population of Port Charles or Pine Valley can fade into happily-ever-after oblivion.

A final resolution to a soap opera's narrative seems so unlikely in part because we follow the activities of an entire community of characters rather than the fate of a few protagonists. It is not at all unusual for a soap opera to feature more than forty regularly appearing characters at any given time—not including those characters who have been consigned to the netherworld between full citizenship in the community and death: characters who are living in London, New York, or some other distant city; or whose fate is "uncertain." These large communities represent elaborate networks of character relationships, where "who" someone is is a matter of to whom he or she is related by marriage, kinship, or friendship. These complex character networks in daytime soap operas distinguish them even from their prime-time counterparts such as Dallas and Dynasty. Although the latter are serial narratives (like daytime soaps) and foreground character relationships, their networks are much smaller and are organized around a few central characters. The community of a nighttime soap consists of only twelve to fifteen regular characters at any given time.

In an attempt to account for the soap opera viewing process, we might begin by recalling Iser's point that we can never experience a narrative work in its totality while we are reading it; we are always someplace "inside" its structure rather than outside of it contemplating it as a whole. However, unlike closed narrative forms (the novel, the short story, the feature film, the made-for-TV movie), the soap opera does not give us a position after "The End" from which to look back on the entire text. The final page of a soap opera never comes, nor is it ever anticipated by the viewer. As soap opera viewers, we cannot help but be inside the narrative flow of the soap opera text. Furthermore, our "wandering" through the soap opera text as viewers is a process that can occur quite literally over the course of decades.

Even if we wished to view the entire text of All My Children or General Hospital to this point in its history we would be unable to do so. Neither could we view portions of previous textual material that we missed or wished to re-view (unless, of course, we have been videotaping each episode and saving them). Our viewing of soap operas is regulated by their being parceled out in weekday installments. Certainly, it is a characteristic of films and television programs that, unlike literature, the rate at which we "read" is a function of the text itself rather than our reading activity. Except where we manipulate the "special effects" features on videotape recorders, the images on the screen flash by at a predetermined and unalterable rate. With soap operas, and to a lesser degree with other series and serial forms of television narrative, this reading regulation is not just technological, but institutional as well—a measured portion of text is allocated for each episode and for each scene within an episode. Unlike the series form of television narrative, where a complete story is told in each episode and only the setting and characters carry through from week to week, the soap opera simply suspends the telling of its stories at the end of the hour or half-hour without any pretext of narrative resolution within a given episode. Unlike the radio soap operas of the 1930s and 1940s, the television soaps of today do not end each episode with an announcer's voice asking: "Will Mary forgive John's thoughtlessness and agree to marry him? Join us tomorrow. . . ." However, the calculated suspension of the text at the end of each episode of a television soap implicitly encourages the viewer to ask the same sort of question and provides the same answer: you'll have to tune in tomorrow to find out.

Viewed in terms of reader-oriented criticism, the time between the end of one soap opera episode and the beginning of the next constitutes an institutionally mandated gap between syntagmatic segments of the text. Iser comments on a parallel pattern of textual organization in the novels of Dickens and in serialized fiction in magazines. During Dickens's lifetime most of his readers read his novels in weekly magazine installments, rather than as chapters of a single book. In fact, says Iser, they frequently reported enjoying the serialized version of The Old Curiosity Shop or Martin Chuzzlewit more than the same work as a book. Their heightened enjoyment was a result of the protensive tension occasioned by every textual gap (What's going to happen next?) being increased by the "strategic interruption" of the narrative at crucial moments, while the delay in satisfying the reader's curiosity was prolonged. By structuring the text around the gaps between installments and by making those gaps literally days in length, the serial novel supercharged the reader's imagination and made him or her a more active reader.⁸

The relationship Iser sees between "strategic interruption" and heightened enjoyment would seem to apply with particular force to the experience of watching soap operas. It might also be responsible, in part at least, for the frequently commented-upon loyalty of many soap opera viewers and for the pleasure many viewers take in talking about their "stories" (my mother's generic term for soap operas) with other viewers. The day-long, institutionally enforced suspension of those stories increases the viewer's desire to once again join the lives of the characters the viewer has come to know over the course of years of viewing. And, because the viewer cannot induce the text to start up again, some of the energy generated by this protensive tension might get channeled into discourse about the text among fellow viewers. Furthermore, the range of protensive possibilities the viewer has to talk and wonder about is considerably wider in soap operas than in many other types of narrative. Unlike texts with a single protagonist with whom the reader identifies almost exclusively, the soap opera distributes interest among an entire community of characters, thus making any one character narratively dispensable. Even characters the viewer has known for decades may suddenly die in plane crashes, lapse into comas, or simply "leave town."

Textual gaps exist not only between soap opera episodes but within each episode as well. Each episode is planned around the placement of commercial messages, so that the scene immediately preceding a commercial raises a narrative question. For the sponsor, the soap opera narrative text is but a pretext for the commercial—the "bait" that arouses the viewer's interest and prepares him or her for the delivery of the sales pitch. For the viewer, however, the commercial is an interruption of the narrative—another gap between textual segments, providing an excellent opportunity to reassess previous textual information and reformulate expectations regarding future developments. We might even argue that the repetition and predictability of commercial messages encourages this retentive and protensive activity. The Tide commercial might be novel enough to attend to the first time, but is not likely to hold the viewer's attention thereafter.

Iser theorizes that textual gaps can also be created by "cutting" between plot lines in a story. Just when the reader's interest has been secured by the characters and situation of one plot line, the text shifts perspective suddenly to another set of characters and another plot strand. In doing so, says Iser, "the reader is forced to try to find connections between the hitherto familiar story and the new, unforeseeable situations. He is faced with a whole network of possibilities, and thus begins himself to formulate missing links."⁹ As regular soap opera viewers know, in any given episode there are likely to be three, four, or more major plot lines unfolding. The text "cuts" among them constantly. The action in scene I might simply be suspended for a time while we look in on another plot line. Later in the episode we might rejoin the action in scene I as if no time had elapsed in the interval, or we might join that plot line at a later moment in time.

The gaps that structure the soap opera viewing experience—between episodes, between one scene and the next, as well as those created by commercial interruptions—become all the more important when one considers the complex network of character relationships formed by the soap opera community. In a sense, the soap opera trades narrative closure for paradigmatic complexity. Anything might happen to an individual character, but, in the long run, it will not affect the community of characters as a whole. By the same token, everything that happens to an individual character affects other characters to whom he or she is related.

When I first began watching soap operas regularly I was struck by the amount of narrative redundancy within each episode. In scene I Skip tells Carol that he is calling off the wedding. Two scenes later, Carol tells Greg that Skip has called off the wedding. After the first commercial break, Greg tells Susan that Skip and Carol have broken up. This same piece of information—that Skip and Carol are not to be wed—might be repeated four or five times in the course of an hour-long episode. The repetition of information from one episode to the next can be accounted for as an attempt to keep infrequent viewers up to date, but why is the same piece of information related many times within the same episode? This is a puzzle only for the new soap opera viewer. The regular viewer, familiar with the paradigmatic structure of that particular soap (that is, its network of character relationships), will know that who tells whom is just as important as what is being told. The regular viewer knows that Greg still loves Carol and that Susan has schemed to keep Skip and Carol apart so that she can have Skip for herself. Each retelling of the information, "Skip has called off the wedding," is viewed against the background formed by the totality of character interrelationships. Thus the second and third retellings within the same episode are far from being paradigmatically redundant.

How is this paradigmatic complexity related to the structuring gaps of the soap opera text? The size of the soap opera community, the complexity of its character relationships, and the fact that soap opera characters possess both histories and memories all combine to create an almost infinite set of potential connections between one plot event and another. The syntagmatic juxtaposition of two plot lines (a scene from one following or preceding a scene from the other) arouses in the viewer the possibility of a paradigmatic connection between them. But because the connection the text makes is only a syntagmatic one, the viewer is left to imagine what sort of, if any, other connection they might have. The range of latent relationships evoked by the gaps between scenes is dependent upon the viewer's familiarity with the current community of characters and his or her historical Knowledge of previous character relationships. In a very real sense, then, the better one "knows" a soap opera, the greater reason one has for wanting to watch every day. Conversely, the less involved one is in a given soap opera's textual network, the more that soap opera appears to be merely a series of plot lines that unfold so slowly that virtually nothing "happens" in any given episode and the more tiresomely redundant each episode seems.

In 1961 Wayne C. Booth's book The Rhetoric of Fiction foregrounded a common-sensical but frequently overlooked fact of literature: every story represents not just the construction of a fictional world, but a story told from a certain perspective by certain narrational means. In other words, as Sarah Kozloff points out in her essay, every story implies a storyteller. Furthermore, the perspective from which the story is told carries with it attitudes toward the fictional world created in the story. Even in works that ostensibly give us "just the facts," inevitably there are attitudes toward those facts given as well.

Reader-oriented criticism has focused on the corollary to Booth's observation: if every story necessarily involves a storyteller, it also involves someone to whom and for whose benefit the story is being told. But before proceeding further, we need to establish the nature of the storyteller and story reader we're talking about here. Obviously, to say that a piece of narrative fiction involves a communication between addresser and addressee is to compare it to a face-to-face communication. However, reading a novel or watching a television drama differs in several key respects from talking with a friend. In the first place, the actual addresser (author) of a piece of narrative fiction is absent at the moment of reading, just as the actual addressee (reader) is always absent at the moment of writing. Furthermore, what is being referred to in a novel or fictional television drama is only indirectly related to the immediate environment either the author or the reader inhabits (it is the fact that what we are reading does not exist that makes it fiction), so that the reader has no "real" points of reference against which to test the message being delivered in the narrative. Thus both the addresser and the addressee dealt with by narratological analysis and (with several notable exceptions to be discussed later) reader-oriented criticism are textual constructs, not flesh-and-blood human beings. To use a dangerously ambiguous term, the reader of a story constructs its teller as the "point of view" with which the values, norms, and attitudes expressed in the work are consistent.

In attempting to specify "to whom" a story is told and the role this addressee ought/might play in the reading process, reader-oriented theorists have proposed a bewildering array of readers: "fictive reader" (Iser), "model reader" (Eco), "intended reader" (Wolff), "characterized reader" (Prince), "ideal reader" (Culler and others), "inside" and "outside reader" (Sherbo), "implied reader" (Iser, Booth, Chatman, and others), and "superreader" (Riffaterre)—to name but some of the "readers" who now populate literary studies. Although each of these terms constructs a reader different in some respects from all the others, all of them refer to one of two types of readers: "implied fictional readers" and "characterized fictional readers." (Yes, I know I just added two more—and more complicated—terms to the list, but you can't very well talk about "two types of readers" without naming them in some fashion.)¹⁰

As anyone who has ever tried to tell an anecdote or a joke knows, every story is constructed around a set of assumptions the teller makes about his or her audience: what they know or don't know; how they are likely to feel about certain things (Republicans, college teachers, mothers-in-law); why they are willing to listen to the story to begin with; how it is likely to fit in with other stories or jokes they might already have heard; and so forth. "Model," "ideal," "super," "implied," and "intended" all refer to the composite of these assumptions as they are manifested within the narrative itself—hence the term "implied fictional reader," which I am borrowing from W. Daniel Wilson to refer to this category of reader.

For some theorists, the implied fictional reader is a projection into the text of the qualities possessed by the kind of reader the author had in mind when he or she wrote the work—hence the use of the terms "model," "ideal," and "super" to refer to this reader in the author's mind. In semiotic terms, the ideal reader would be one who fully shared the textual, lexical, cultural, and ideological codes employed by the author. As Umberto Eco describes the model reader, it is the reader "supposedly able to deal interpretively with the [text's] expressions in the same way as the author deals generatively with them." Eco's formulation reminds us that for any narrative to "work" for the reader, he or she must literally and figuratively speak something resembling the same language as the author." The author must be able to presuppose certain competencies on the part of the reader if for no other reason than in order to select those things that must be made explicit in the text from those that can be left unsaid, knowing that the reader should be able to fill them in.

Some reader-oriented critics would make the correlation between the ideal reader and real readers a touchstone for intepretive validity. They would argue that the closer the reader comes to the qualities possessed by the ideal reader the author had in mind when he or she wrote the work, the closer that reader comes to fully understanding the work. As Booth puts it, "The author creates .. . an image of himself and another image of his reader; he makes the reader, as he makes his second self, and the most successful reading is one in which the created selves, author and reader, can find complete agreement."¹² Others, however, would claim that although the author might have kept before him or her the image of an ideal reader, the only real reader that could possibly fill that role is the author him- or herself! Were the author and reader to share every code, literary communication would be unnecessary because there would be nothing new to say.

In an attempt to avoid getting too bogged down in the ongoing debates over the nature of and name for the implied reader in the text, we might regard the implied fictional reader as a textual place or site rather than a hypothetical person. It is the position the text asks us to occupy—the preferred vantage point from which to observe the world of the text. In other words, every fiction offers not only a structure of characters, events, and settings, but a structure of attitudes, norms, and values as well. The reader is invited to take up a position relative to these structures. That "place" turns out to be the other side of the point of view that has organized the text's world—the point of view the reader is offered from which to observe that world.

One of the most obvious ways the reader's place in the text can be established is by referring directly to the reader: addressing the reader directly, confiding in the reader, appealing to the reader, describing what the reader knows or probably feels, even questioning or challenging the reader's interpretation of the text thus far. In other words, the text might create a "characterized fictional reader." Such a strategy was common in the eighteenth-century British novel (Fielding's Tom Jones, for example), reaching perhaps its most elaborate (and funniest) use in Laurence Sterne's novel, Tristram Shandy.¹³

The characterized reader was less frequently employed in nineteenth-century novels, and by the twentieth century had all but disappeared from mainstream fiction. Similarly, by the time we reach Hemingway, narrators in novels had become, if not invisible, certainly depersonalized.

The classical Hollywood cinema expends tremendous effort to hide the means by which it tells its stories. It also engages its viewers covertly, making them unseen observers of the world that always appears fully formed and autonomous. With very few exceptions (most of them comedies), the viewer of a Hollywood film is neither addressed or acknowledged. One of the cardinal sins of Hollywood acting style is looking into the lens of the camera, because doing so threatens to break the illusion of "as if it were real" by reminding viewers of the apparatus that intervenes between them and the world on the screen. This is certainly not to say that there is no implied viewer constructed by Hollywood films. In fact, if we once again consider the implied viewer as a position relative to the world of the text, it is easier to see how the viewer is located "within" the Hollywood film than is the reader within the traditional novel. Given that the viewer's knowledge of the world of the film comes through the camera, the viewer is quite literally positioned "some place" relative to the action in every shot. Furthermore, as the chapters on feminist and psychoanalytic criticism make clear, the Hollywood film carefully "writes" its viewer into the text, usually establishing its gender as male and skillfully regulating the manner by which "he" engages with the characters.

Although we would find being addressed directly by a character in a Hollywood film unusual (and perhaps discomforting), as Sarah Kozloff points out we accept the "characterized viewer" as an integral part of television. In fact, our experience of television involves two quite different modes of viewer engagement. The first, which we might call the Hollywood narrative mode, represents the adaptation to television of the classical Hollywood narrative style and its means of drawing the viewer into the text: spectator omniscience and invisibility, alternation between third- and first-person points of view and between shot and reverse shot, hiding the means by which the world of the text is created, etcetera. We find the Hollywood mode most prevalent in those television programs still shot "film style"—prime-time dramas of all sorts, (including both series and serials), made-for-TV movies, and some situation comedies. Daytime soap operas and some situation comedies have modified the Hollywood style to accommodate what is called "three-camera, live-tape" shooting; an entire scene is enacted while being shot simultaneously by three (or more) television cameras. The director electronically "cuts" between one camera and another as the scene unfolds. Live-tape production makes the shot/reverse shot and subjective point-of-view shot much more difficult to achieve than in Hollywood-style filmmaking, because repositioning the camera for the reverse shot would require penetrating the space of the scene. Hence, subjectivity in soap operas is usually rendered aurally rather than visually, by showing a close-up of a character while his or her thoughts are heard on the sound track. Despite some degree of deviation from the Hollywood cinema style, however, live-tape television style seldom, if ever, addresses the viewer and observes most other conventions of Hollywood style.

The other mode of viewer engagement on television, which we might call the rhetorical mode, derives historically from radio practice of the 1930s and 1940s and ultimately, I suppose, from the "point-to-point" communication technologies that radio superceded: the telephone and the telegraph,¹⁴ Included in the rhetorical mode would be news programs, variety shows, talk shows, "self-help" and educational programs (cooking, exercise, and gardening shows, for example), sports, game shows, and many commercials. In the rhetorical mode, both the addresser and the addressee (what Sarah Kozloff calls the "narratee") are openly acknowledged. The former is frequently personified or "characterized" as the reporter, anchorperson, announcer, host, master of ceremonies, or quiz master. The viewer is addressed directly as characters look directly into the camera and speak to "you, the home viewer." The means of presentation, particularly the technological means of presentation, are frequently emphasized rather than hidden. David Letterman shoots rubber darts at the camera; Jeopardy "answers" are revealed via a bank of television monitors; local television newscasts originate from what looks to be the newsroom itself; television screens are built into the sets of news programs so that anchorpersons can talk with reporters in the field; and (in our local television market, at least) a favorite closing shot for the evening newscast is one that reveals set, cameras, and all. The "personified addresser"—host, anchor, or quiz master—manipulates this technology and mediates between the world on the other side of the screen and that in our living rooms. In doing so, he or she (it is usually a he) offers "us" a better view, more information, a dazzling technical spectacle, or, seemingly, an insider's view of how things "really work" behind the scenes.

One of the hallmarks of the rhetorical mode—and another striking difference between its method of viewer engagement and that offered by Hollywood films—is its use of characterized viewers. Direct address is but the most obvious way by which the viewer is represented on television (as the "person" Dan Rather says "good evening" to at the beginning of CBS Evening News). Television frequently provides us with onscreen characterized viewers—textual surrogates who "do" what real viewers cannot: interact with other characters and respond in an ideal fashion to the appeals, demands, and urgings of the addresser.

These on-screen characterized viewers abound on television commercials. An ad for Time magazine, for example, opens with a man sitting at his desk at home. An off-screen voice asks him, "How would you like to get Time delivered to your home every week for half-off the newsstand price?" The man looks into the camera as the voice speaks, but before he can respond the voice adds, "You'll also receive this pocket calculator with your paid subscription." An arm emerges from off-screen and hands the calculator to the man. He nods his acceptance of the offer, but before he can speak the voice piles on still more incentives. Finally, with not the slightest doubt remaining that the man will become a Time subscriber, the voice orders him to place the toll-free call. The man hesitates. "What are you waiting for?" the voice asks. "You haven't told me the number," the man objects. The voice responds with the number and it magically appears at the bottom of the screen. The commercial ends with the man placing the phone call.

Notice that in this example the characterized addressee stands in a different relationship to the text's addresser than does the implied addressee (the "presumed" viewer at home). The man in the Time ad enjoys a direct, faceto-face (or, in this case at least, face-to-voice) relationship with the person who addresses him. The technology necessary to bring the commercial message "to us" disappears and is replaced by an unmediated interpersonal communication situation. In many television commercials and network and local promos, the characterized addressee is established not just to personalize and textualize the implied viewer but to make an interpersonal exchange out of a one-way, mass-communication phenomenon. The characterized addressee is established in a setting suggesting that of the implied audience: the kitchen (particularly in commercials directed at women and shown during daytime programming), the den, the family or living room. Then the addresser enters the space of the characterized addressee and talks with him or her directly. In a Drano ad, for example, we see an aproned woman standing forlornly in front of her sink while a male voice booms accusingly, "YOUR SINK'S STOPPED UP." A few years ago, at the beginning of the fall season, CBS ran a series of promotions featuring some of its schedule's most famous stars. In one vignette, a weary young woman returns to her apartment after a hard day at work, turns on the television set, and is startled to find Tom Selleck, as Magnum, standing in her living room. In a parallel scene, a young man turns on his TV set, and a television image of Loni Anderson magically is transformed into the actress herself in the man's den.

The Time ad illustrates another aspect of television's use of the characterized viewer—a blurring of the distinction between characterized addressee, implied addressee, and addresser. When the man responds to the voice, he does so by looking directly into the camera. Thus, he looks at "us" as if we were the source of the message. In a Hollywood film one of the principal ways of establishing identification between the viewer and a character in the film is via a strategy called "glance/object" editing. We are shown a close-up of a character as that character looks off-screen. The second shot, taken from that character's point of view, shows us what he or she sees. A third shot returns us to the close-up of the character. In the rhetorical television mode, however, glance/object editing is short-circuited, because "we" turn out to be the object of the character's glance. In the curious logic of this mode, the "voice" of the commercial is made into our voice, as the man establishes the connection between our gaze and "the" voice. At the same time "we" are characterized as the man who responds to that voice, he who acts as we "should" act. The superimposition of the telephone number at the end of the ad, however, addresses "us" rather than "him," because 1) he attends to the voice telling him the number, rather than to its appearance on the screen, and 2) even if he did notice it, it would be backwards!

This purposive collapsing of addresser, characterized addressee, and implied addressee in television's rhetorical mode creates what Robert Stam has called, with regard to news programming, "the regime of the fictive We." In the middle of As the World Turns, the announcer says, "We'll return in just a moment." A promo for PM Magazine says "Tonight on PM Magazine we'll journey to Rome. . . ." The examples are legion. Who is this "we"? Perhaps it merely stands for the collective "senders" of the message—the news staff, the "folks" at Procter and Gamble, and so on. But the referent of television's "we" is usually left vague enough to cover both the addresser and the implied addressee. Stam sees the "misrecognition of mirror-like images" in the fictive We to have serious political consequences:

Shortly after the ill-fated "rescue attempt" in Iran . . . Chuck Scarborough of New York's Channel 4 News began his newscast, "Well, we did our best; but we didn't make it." The "We" in this case presumably included the newscaster, the president, and a few aides. It certainly did not include the majority of Americans, even if their "support" could be artfully simulated after the fact. Television news, then, claims to speak for us, and often does, but just as often it deprives us of the right to speak by deluding us into thinking that its discourse is our own.¹⁵

The characterized addressee plays an equally important role in two other television genres—the game show and the talk show. Whereas the commercial and the news program tend to characterize their addressees individually, game and talk shows represent their addressees as a group—the "studio audience." Also, to follow up a point made by Kozloff, in the examples above the impersonal experience of watching television was made into an interpersonal exchange by situating the action on the "viewer's" side of the television set, in the characterized addressee's living room, kitchen, etcetera. In talk and game shows, the characterized viewer is made a part of "the show." The studio audience is "there," where it really happens, able to experience the show with their own eyes rather than through the mediation of the camera lens.

Most game and talk shows carefully regulate the response of their studio audiences in order that this "actual" audience is characterized to the home viewer as an ideal audience. With the aid of "applause" signs in the studio, the audience unfailingly responds at the appropriate moment—when a new guest is introduced, when the contestant wins the big prize, when it is time for a commercial. Some game and talk shows employ someone (who usually doubles as the show's announcer) to lead the studio audience's response. Occasionally on Late Night with David Letterman, for example, the viewer at home can see announcer Bill Wendell standing between studio audience and set frantically waving his arms for a more vociferous response from the studio audience. As with many talk shows, Wendell also "warms up" the studio audience before taping begins by telling a few jokes, informing the audience what to expect when taping actually begins, and quite literally telling them how to behave as a "good" audience. At a taping I attended a few years ago, Wendell admonished us, "If you chuckle silently to yourself, no one at home will think you're laughing at all. When you think something is funny, let it out!"

Game and talk shows also employ devices to individualize the studio audience. David Letterman and Johnny Carson go into the audience to play "Stump the Band" or "Ask Mr. Melman" with selected members of the audience. Donahue is predicated upon individual members of the studio audience asking "guests" the type of questions "we" would ask if "we" were there. Notice, however, that even when the characterized viewer is allowed to speak as an individual member of the studio audience, his or her discourse is carefully regulated and channeled. It is Phil Donahue (or his assistant) who wields the microphone and determines who is chosen to speak and for how long. The person speaking speaks to and looks at either Phil or the guests on stage. Only Phil looks directly into the camera and addresses "us." Notice also that by positioning Phil among the studio audience rather than on stage with the guests and by allowing him to serve as a spokesman for both studio and home viewers ("You'll forgive us, Mr. X, if we are just a little skeptical of your claim that all we need to do to balance the budget is . . ."), Donahue collapses "host," studio audience, and home audience into television's fictive "we," and covers over the means by which the responses of the characterized viewer are regulated.

In the talk show, although the studio audience is addressed and individual members are allowed to speak, the roles of host, guests, and characterized audience are demarcated, if on some shows purposefully blurred. The audience stays "in its place" on this side of the stage; guests are isolated onstage in front of the audience (at home and in the studio); the host negotiates and regulates the relationship between them and the home viewer. Except in the unlikely event that a studio audience member is called upon to speak for a few seconds (even on Donahue only a tiny portion of the studio audience actually speaks), his or her role is primarily that of exemplary viewer—one who listens, looks, and responds appropriately. In the game show, however, the characterized viewer crosses the line normally separating characterized "audience" from "show." This transformation of audience member into character is perhaps best exemplified by Johnny Olson's invitation to "come on down" on The Price Is Right. We might speculate that a large measure of the pleasure we derive from game shows stems from the fact that the contestant is more like "us" than like "them." As a characterized viewer he or she appears to us as a "real" person acting spontaneously, not an actor reading lines. (Although on many game shows the contestants are carefully screened and coached, and even if drawn at random from the studio audience, the contestant is no doubt aware of the role he or she is expected to play from having watched the show before.) In those instances in which contestants are selected from the studio audience, they are plucked from among "us."

By splitting off one or more characterized viewers from the rest of the studio audience, the game show sets up a circuit of viewer involvement. When Bob Barker asks the contestant to guess how much the travel trailer costs, we almost automatically slip into the role of contestant, guessing along with him or her. If we guess correctly along with the contestant, the bells and whistles go off for us as well as for him or her. But we can also distance ourselves from the contestants and take up the position of the studio audience as they encourage the contestants and, on The Price Is Right, at least, shout out what they believe to be the correct guess. As we watch a game show, we constantly shift from one viewer position to another, collapsing the distance between contestants and ourselves as we answer along with them, falling back into the role of studio audience as we assess contestant prowess and luck (or lack thereof), assuming a position superior to both when we know more than they. The viewerpositioning strategy of the game show encourages us to mimic the responses of the characterized viewer in the text. Indeed, I find it difficult to watch a game show without vocally responding (whether or not someone else is in the room with me). I can't resist answering the questions myself, nor can I resist commenting on a contestant's abysmal ignorance when I have the correct answer and he or she doesn't.

It is not coincidental that commercial television has developed a sophisticated rhetorical mode of viewer engagement within which so much energy is expended in giving the viewer at home an image of him or herself on the screen. The Hollywood cinema style has developed to serve a system of economic exchange in which the viewer pays "up front" for the opportunity to enjoy the cinematic experience that follows the purchase of a ticket. No further action is required of the viewer once he or she leaves the theatre to fulfill the implicit contract between institution and viewer/consumer. On the other hand, commercial television succeeds only by persuading the viewer to respond at another time, in another place, in a prescribed manner—in other words, the implicit contract the viewer has with television is fulfilled not in front of the television set, but in the grocery store. Television demands that we act; hence it is inherently rhetorical. Furthermore, that action must occur on "this" side of the television set. If the Hollywood film-viewing situation is centripetal (the one bright spot of moving light in a dark room that draws us into another world and holds us there for ninety minutes), then television is centrifugal. Its texts are not only presented for us, but directed out at us. Ironically its messages drive us away from the set, out into the "real" world of commodities and services. By conflating addresser and addressee under the regime of the fictive "we," commercial television softens the bluntness of its rhetorical thrust. By positioning "us" in "their" position, we seem to be talking ourselves into acting. By adopting the style and mode of address of commercials, other genres of television programming rehearse "for fun" what the commercials do in earnest. Every commercial is an implicit unanswered question—"will you buy?"—that calls for action the commercial text itself cannot provide, because only "real" viewers can buy the very real commodities the commercials advertise. By offering characterized viewers within the text, commercials fictively answer their own questions with resounding affirmation. We should not be too surprised, then, when talk shows, game shows, religious programs, and other forms of commercial television programming also "write in" their own viewers and provide them with opportunities to respond and act in an affirming, if carefully regulated, manner.

In this regard, ' perhaps the ultimate expression of television's rhetorical mode is the television "phone-athon," in which appeals for financial contributions to religious groups, public television stations, or charitable causes are made. The host usually stands in front of a raised bank of tables, behind which staff members or volunteers sit answering telephones. The calls they receive are, of course, pledges phoned in from viewers who have responded to the host's plea for financial support. Obviously, it is hardly necessary that the reception of telephone pledges be done on-screen. But fund raisers realize the important function served by keeping those answered telephones in the background. Each ringing telephone is (in semiotic terminology) an indexical sign for a characterized viewer—a reminder to the audience of how they "should" act. Furthermore, by combining televisual and telephone technologies, the phone-a-thon links the sign of these characterized viewers to the responses of real viewers as the latter provide a material response to the text's rhetorical demand.

Reader-oriented approaches to literature would deprive the text of its power to enforce meaning on the reader and, at the very least, shift critical attention away from "the words on the page" to the interaction between reader and textual structure. But does this interaction result in the reader merely following the text's instructions for the assembly of meaning? Or is meaning production so dependent upon the individual reader and his or her reading activity that each reading quite literally produces a different meaning? To what degree is meaning production an individual activity at all? How is an individual reading influenced by forces external to that act—linguistic, cultural, institutional, and ideological forces of which the individual reader might not even be aware?

Any attempt to grapple with these questions requires that the critic first answer another: "What, exactly, is the reader-oriented critic analyzing?" For the traditional "figure-in-the-carpet" critic, the object of study was self-evident. Because the text's meaning was to be found within it, then obviously critics studied texts. But if we accept, with Jonathan Culler, that the study of "literature" is no longer an attempt to interpret texts but to account for "their intelligibility: the ways in which they make sense, the ways in which readers have made sense of them," then what are literary critics now supposed to study?¹⁶ Can this sense-making process be extrapolated from the text itself? As we have seen in previous sections of this chapter, reader-oriented critics aligned with the phenomenological school of Ingarden, Iser, and Jauss would answer a qualified "yes." They would assert that we can learn a great deal about the reading act through study of the textual structures and strategies that guide and, to some degree, regulate that process.

Other reader-oriented critics would argue that the critical moves of Iser and others represent a feint rather than a shift in the orientation of literary studies. Given that Iser's "reader" is always an abstract construct, evidence for whose alleged maneuvers are always drawn from something we are supposed to recognize as "the text," how different, they ask, is Iser's analysis of the reading act from more traditional types of interpretation?¹⁷ Has he merely replaced "the" meaning of a text with a slightly more liberal notion of "instructions for meaning production?"

Terry Bagleton, among others, points out the paradox in Iser's theory caused by his acceptance of the proposition that meaning is a product of a reader's activity at the same time he holds to the idea that evidence for that activity can be found by studying texts. "If one considers the 'text in itself as a kind of skeleton, a set of 'schemata' waiting to be concretized in various ways by various readers, how can one discuss these schemata at all without having already concretized them? In speaking of the 'text itself,' measuring it as a norm against particular interpretations of it, is one ever dealing with anything more than one's own concretization?" Eagleton calls this a version "of the old problem of how one can know the light in the refrigerator is off when the door is closed."¹⁸

Iser's counter here has been to maintain a certain degree of objectivity for the textual features that guide the reader's response. Without this, he argues, the text melts away into the subjective experience of each reader's activation of it. In other words, Iser worries that if we can't agree there's something "there" in the text that at least stimulates and guides meaning production, literary scholars might as well pack up shop and find another line of work.

For several American reader-oriented critics, Iser's paradox is created by his unwillingness to accept the consequences of his own line of reasoning—even if taking that step means that literary scholars have to find something to study other than "the text." For Norman Holland, the reading act is a kind of transactional therapy and process of individual self-realization. In reading, he says, the reader uses the text "as grist with which to re-create himself, that is, to make yet another variation of his single, enduring identity."¹⁹ This "single, enduring identity" constitutes each personality's central organizing principle and the means by which he or she relates to the outside world. This identity changes as the individual adjusts to the flux of experience, but it also structures and reorders that flux according to its internal psychic logic. Holland uses the term "work" of literature as a verb rather than a noun. The words on the page merely initiate a process by which the reader "works on" a story, "works it over" according to his identity theme, and, finally, "works it into" his or her identity.

If we accept Holland's account of how texts (now reduced to merely words on the page) are made to mean, then the object of study for the literary critic becomes the reader's identity theme and the manner by which it "works" on texts, because it—not the text—is the stable and determining feature of the reading transaction. In 5 Readers Reading, Holland puts his theory into practice. He identifies the identity themes of five undergraduate students through standard personality tests and other means, has them all read several stories, and then discusses their responses with them to attempt to discover signs of their individual identity themes in their interpretations of the stories. What results is, for Holland, proof of his theory of reading as self-realization. For Holland's detractors, however, 5 Readers Reading is either a circular and self-fulfilling exercise (by establishing the "identity theme" as the independent variable in his experiment and then looking for evidence of its effect in the reader's responses, Holland is almost sure to find what he is looking for) or an inadvertent demonstration that, if Holland's theory is correct, the critic can do no more than reflect upon his or her own identity theme, not anyone else's. As William Ray puts it, "the subject whose self re-creation fills 5 Readers Reading is none of the five students described, but Holland himself, whose hundreds of pages of interpretation have predigested and reformulated the raw data of the reader's responses and therefore represent the only sustained reader transaction to which we could possibly respond."²⁰

For Stanley Fish, reading is not the individual and selfrealizing activity Holland describes, but a fundamentally social process. In his view, the "self is "a social construct whose operations are delimited by the systems of intelligibility that inform it."²¹ Thus differences in interpretation arise from differences in the assumptions that underlie different "interpretive communities," rather than from differences between individuals. What appears to the reader as his or her individual imposition of meaning is actually the result of a system of belief and resultant interpretive strategies he or she shares (usually unknowingly) with a larger community of readers. Fish shifts the focus of literary criticism one step further away from "the text." According to him, there are no "textual structures" that exist apart from a particular interpretive strategy that looks for and values them; there is no individual reader whose activities might be isolated and theorized; both text and individual reader are social products. With Fish the very notion of a text depends upon an interpretive community that endows this set of marks with that status. The famous example Fish uses in his Is There a Text in This Class? is of a reading list left on the blackboard of his classroom by a previous instructor. Told by Fish that this list was a poem, the class was able to produce analyses of it as a poem—thus demonstrating to Fish that the category "poetry" is a function, not of authorial intention or textual organization, but rather of a particular system of belief (in this case that which governs reading in college literature classes).²²

What, then, does Fish suggest literary critics study? Implicit in Fish's formulation of reading is the challenge to the critic to uncover the largely unarticulated assumptions of interpretive communities, especially those that dominate the reception of texts at a particular point in history, which would presumably account for variations in reading between readers and across cultures and time. Fish is quick to point out, however, that such an exercise is also subject to the forces it attempts to explain. Unlike Holland, who would reserve some objective space within which the critic could operate, Fish fully admits that his ability to read other critics as manifestations of the beliefs of a particular interpretive community is only possible because of the beliefs that inform Fish's own work—beliefs that, in effect, sanction what Fish does as "criticism." As with other reader-oriented theories, one has to admit that there is no position "outside" reading from which one can read the responses of other readers. Fish holds out no hope to those who would adopt his metacritical strategy that the uncovering of the assumptions of another interpretive community (or even of the critic's own) will change anyone's mind or bring us closer to "the truth." He warns his readers that his theory "is not one that you (or anyone else) could live by. Its thesis is that whatever seems to you to be obvious and inescapable is only so within some institutional or conventional structure, and that means that you can never operate outside some such structure, even if you are persuaded by the thesis."²³

Fish's emphasis on the power of interpretive communities to determine the meaning of texts (and, indeed, the power to establish what a text is) should serve as one more reminder that all reading activity, including "reading" television, occurs within larger contexts. Furthermore, although he differs with them in many other respects, Fish shares with semiotic, ideological, and pyschoanalytic theorists the recognition that language, ideology, culture, and institutions to some degree "speak" us as readers and viewers. One of the "axioms" of modern critical research, says Jonathan Culler, is "that the individuality of the individual cannot function as a principle of explanation, for it is itself a complex cultural construct, a heterogeneous product rather than a unified cause."²⁴

As students of television, we might also be reminded by Fish's notion of "interpretive communities" of the norms of the critical community by which television has been judged as an actual or potential art form. As I pointed out in the Introduction, one of the reasons, I believe, that so little aesthetic analysis of television has been produced over the past forty years (relative to the pervasiveness of the medium and the sheer quantity of "texts" produced over that same time) is that the dominant critical community has embraced the values of what Iser would call "traditional" criticism. In addition to the "figure-in-the-carpet" assumptions about what and how texts mean, these values would include the belief that a single artistic vision should be expressed in a work of art, that good art requires intellectual work on the part of the perceiver, and that art works should be autonomous and unified entities, among others. As I have argued elsewhere with specific reference to radio and television soap operas, it is difficult to fit many forms of broadcast programming into a critical schema that assumes these values.²⁵ Who is the author of a situation comedy? How can one analyze a text that, like the soap opera, refuses to end? Because critics have found it difficult to discern the textual markers of art in television, they have seen little there to analyze. Furthermore, where critics have found the exceptional program on television worthy of detailed analysis (usually a dramatic program that shares some of the qualities of literary or theatrical "art"), they have spoken of it as if its sterling qualities were inside the work itself and "found" by the perceptive critic. This strategy makes it appear that the standards the critic applies are universal and renders evaluative assessments properties of the work, not the application of critical norms by the critic. As Fish points out, however, "all aesthetics .. . are local and conventional rather than universal, reflecting a collective decision as to what will count as literature. . . . Thus criteria of evaluation (that is, criteria for identifying literature) are valid only for the aesthetic they support and reflect."²⁶

Another reader-oriented critic who foregrounds the social nature of the reading act is Tony Bennett. Following on the work of Pierre Macherey, Bennett has contended that all texts come to the reader always already "encrusted" with the effects of previous readings and that it is pointless to speak of a "text" existing separate from these historically specific encrustations. Our reading of any work is inevitably conditioned by other discourses that circulate around it: advertisements for it, reviews, other works of the same genre or author, etc. For Bennett, studying the relationship between literary phenomena and society "requires that everything that has been said or written about a text, every context in which it has been inscribed by the uses to which it has been put, should, in principle, be regarded as relevant to and assigned methodological parity within such a study."²⁷

Bennett cites the example of the James Bond phenomenon. Our viewing of a given James Bond film is conditioned by the previous films in the series; by the novels upon which the films are based; by the characterizations of Bond by Sean Connery and Roger Moore; by the advertisements for both novels and films; by the cover designs for the novels (featuring scantily clad women and the paraphernalia of espionage); by the songs written to accompany the films; by articles in the press about the films, their stars, Ian Fleming, "Bond" himself, British intelligence, and so forth. The film itself is merely one part of "a mobile system of circulating signifiers," a text that is activated by the reader only in relation to the reading of other texts.²⁸

Commercial television might be seen as a gigantic "mobile system of circulating signifiers." Perhaps more than any other form of cultural production, television produces texts that never "stand alone." Rather, they continuously point the viewer in the direction of other texts. This is not surprising, considering the economic basis of commercial television. The viewer does not "buy" the right to view a program (as the reader buys a novel or a moviegoer buys a ticket to a film). The viewer is, in fact, sold to advertisers in lots of one thousand. The text's (program's) status in this exchange is merely that of the bait to keep the viewer watching until the commercial comes on. To the commercial networks, each program is but one device in a larger scheme designed to hold the viewer's attention throughout a block of the day.

Among television program types, the made-for-TV movie might appear to be among the more autonomous with respect to its relationship to other texts.²⁹ It is narratively self-contained, and, unlike the series or the serial, there are no characters or situations that carry over from one movie to the next. In fact, however, the made-for-TV movie relies heavily upon the viewer's familiarity with other texts.

Since the mid-1960s, television programmers have used the made-for-TV movie as an economical substitute for theatrical feature films. The made-for-TV movie presents a promotional problem not found with either the theatrical feature film or the television series, however. Having played in theatres a year or so before its television air date, the theatrical feature film is very much the "already read" text, bringing with it a trail of discourse that accompanied its theatrical release. Thus the audience's familiarity with the film's title, theatrical success, stars, etcetera, make the theatrical feature a known quantity by the time it reaches television screens. Carrying over its characters and setting from week to week, the series has a built-in self-promotional aspect: each episode acts as a "preview of coming attractions" for the next episode. Having no prior theatrical "life" and limited to a single airing, each made-for-TV movie presents a promotional challenge. How can an audience be built for a film whose budget usually precludes the use of big-name Hollywood stars or being based upon a popular novel, and whose single exposure on television means there can be no "word of mouth"? What is there to promote and advertise?

A number of strategies have been employed in an attempt to solve this problem, one of the most common being to make the made-for-TV movie a "problem picture." The film is based upon a current social controversy, and discourse about that controversy is used to promote the film. Over the past ten years nearly every social issue imaginable has become the basis for a made-for-TV movie: missing children (Adam), spouse abuse (The Burning Bed), incest (Something about Amelia), teenage suicide (Surviving), and child molestation (Kids Don't Tell), among many others. The film then represents a narrativization of discourse about a particular social issue already circulating in newspapers, magazines, and other television programs. As Laurie Schulze and others have pointed out, the more disturbing or threatening aspects of these social problems are defused by the made-for-TV movie's reliance upon familiar genres as vehicles for their expression.³⁰ Typically, whether the problem is teenage prostitution or single bars, it is framed by the conventions of the family melodrama and/or the heterosexual romance. In the made-for-TV movie Schulze analyzes—Getting Physical, a 1984 film about female bodybuilding—this generic framing occurs even before the film is aired. One of the most important promotional devices for the made-for-TV movie is display advertising in TV Guide. The viewer's interest must be aroused by an ad illustrating the film's "problem" visually (usually by artwork, rather than a still from the film itself) and describing it in a few words of accompanying text. The TV Guide ad for Getting Physical showed a bikini-clad woman in a frontal bodybuilder pose, beside a photographic insert of a close-up shot of another woman and a man. The text read, "When a beautiful woman becomes a bodybuilder, the sport takes on a whole new shape, and her life new meaning." Schulze comments: "The smaller inserted photograph suggests that the benefit will have something to do with heterosexual desirability. The insert implies that the 'new meaning' given her life will involve the romantic attentions of an attractive male; bodybuilding will facilitate heterosexual romance."³¹

Made-for-TV movies are also promoted on other television programs. In fact, some television talk shows have become little more than vehicles for the promotion of other texts—books, theatrical movies, records, concert appearances, and other television programs. The stars of a forthcoming made-for-TV movie are made "available" for interviews on Entertainment Tonight, Show Business This Week, network morning news shows, and other such programs. The interviews may or may not center on the star's role in the made-for-TV movie, but a "plug" for it is sure to be included. Such star appearances are, of course, most likely to occur on the network showing the made-for-TV movie, and the interview's content and timing are carefully orchestrated to give maximum promotion to the movie.

In January 1986, NBC ran a made-for-TV movie entitled Mafia Princess, based on the memoirs of the daughter of reputed Mafia leader Sam Giancana. The film starred Tony Curtis and All My Children star Susan Lucci. Curtis appeared on both the Today show and Late Night with David Letterman the week before the film's airing. Curtis's remarks about the film on both programs stressed that it was "really" about a relationship between a father and a daughter, thus helping to frame it within the family melodrama genre. Interestingly, however, the interviews touched relatively briefly on Mafia Princess, emphasizing instead Curtis's recovery from drug abuse, his early struggles as a Hollywood actor, and his relationship with his family (particularly with his daughter, Jamie Leigh Curtis). Despite the fact that these topics did not concern Mafia Princess directly, they provided additional layers of discursive "encrustation." Reminded of Curtis's battle with drug abuse, the viewer might watch Mafia Princess for signs of the actor's rehabilitation. If the viewer had not made the connection between the film's subject matter and Curtis's sometimes stormy relationship with his own daughter before the interviews, he or she could not help but be aware of it afterwards. David Letterman even asked Curtis if he had encountered any "Mafia types" during his career in show business. He responded that he had, but coyly refused to discuss the matter further.

All of these encrustations are in addition to the most obvious—representations of organized crime the audience might have encountered in newspapers, magazine articles, other television programs, and films. Even if a viewer of Mafia Princess had managed to miss the ad and article in TV Guide, interviews with Tony Curtis and Susan Lucci, and other forms of promotion, he or she still would not have come to it as a "naive" reader. Mafia Princess cannot be separated from the web of other texts for which it provides a site of intersection—texts about organized crime, Italians, law and criminality, the historical personages upon whom the story was based, family relationships, and so on. Even this rather unremarkable example of textual encrustation serves to support Bennett's contention that "the text is never available for analysis except in the context of its activations."³²

One major difficulty in discussing how reader-oriented criticism might relate to television analysis is the considerable theoretical and methodological diversity among critics whose work might bear the label "reader-oriented." As the section of this chapter on characterized and implied readers and viewers illustrates, there are about as many notions of what a reader is as there are critics talking about readers. Still, the strand of contemporary literary criticism that, however loosely, we can call reader-oriented has helped to at least raise a set of questions that traditional literary analysis left unasked, and in doing so has challenged us to reconsider concepts and assumptions that lie at the very heart of the critical endeavor. What is a text? How is it made to mean? What is the relationship between the world in the text and the world brought to the reading experience by the reader? To what degree is the sense-making capacity of the reader a product of external forces? In a world without texts determinative of their own meaning, what is the role of the critic? Given the fundamental nature of these questions, it should come as no surprise that reader-oriented critics fundamentally disagree about their answers.

The relationship between television and its viewers provides an excellent laboratory in which to test the insights of reader-oriented literary critics—even if, as in the case of Iser, some of those critics themselves might question the applicability of literary theory to the realm of nonliterary popular culture. The movement in reader-oriented criticism away from the notion of a stable and eternal text to that of activations of texts within historically specific conditions of reception is accelerated by the very nature of television. Television programming is inherently ephemeral—here for an hour or so and then gone, perhaps forever. Furthermore, few people in the television industry think in terms of programming as a series of autonomous and isolated texts. Because the goal of commercial television is the stimulation of habitual viewing over long periods, programs are conceived of as links in a continuous chain of programming. Raymond Williams has spoken of television programming as a "planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of programme items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, so that these sequences together compose the real flow, the real 'broadcasting.'""

The insight that texts carry within them a place marked out for the hypothetical reader to occupy applies with particular force to television. Because of its economic nature (that of a vehicle for selling people to advertisers), commercial television addresses its prospective viewers much more directly than does the fictional cinema or literature. The need of advertisers to persuade viewers to become "good viewers" (to accept the arguments of the commercial messages and then purchase the product) infuses all aspects of this "flow" of programming. Viewers are not only directly addressed, they are provided with representations of themselves on the screen and embraced within the all-encompassing realm of the "fictive We."

Finally, although every reading act is "public" in the sense that it occurs within a definite social and cultural context, it is easy to overlook this fact when discussing the literary reading act. Reading a novel seems such a private and individual activity—even if, as Stanley Fish contends, that individual reader merely applies the strategies of a larger interpretive community. The public or social dimensions of television "reading" are undeniable. The simultaneity of television broadcasts, with millions of sets receiving the same images at the same time, makes watching a television program a social phenomenon even if we are "alone" while we watch. The oceanic nature of television programming, its constant references to other texts, the close connections between television and other forms of textual production, all combine to plug any individual act of television viewing into a network of other viewings and other discourses, and to link us as viewers into the larger culture.

¹ Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 3-5.

² For those interested in the finer points of these debates and in the relationship of reader-oriented criticism to other types of analysis, a good introduction is provided by Robert C, Holub, Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction (London: Methuen, 1984). Holub concentrates on the strand of reader-oriented criticism developed in Germany, especially that associated with Wolfgang Iser, Hans Robert Jauss, and their colleagues at the University of Constance. William Ray considers Iser, Ingarden, Holland, Bleich, Culler, and Fish as a part of his more general survey of literary interpretations since phenomenology; see Literary Meaning: From Phenomenology to Deconstruction (London: Basil Blackwell, 1984). Terry Eagleton discusses reception theory from a Marxist perspective in Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Jonathan Culler, more an actor than an observer of disputes in reader-oriented criticism, relates the project of readeroriented criticism to semiotics in The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, and Deconstruction (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981). Two collections of reader-oriented criticism have excellent introductory essays: Susan Suleiman and Inge Crossman, eds., The Reader in the Text: Essays on Audience and Interpretation (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980); and Jane P. Tompkins, ed., Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980).

³ Georges Poulet, "Phenomenology of Reading," New Literary History 1 (October 1969): 56, quoted in Ray, Literary Meaning, p. 101.

⁴ See Roman Ingarden, The Literary Work of Art, trans. George C. Grabowicz (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1973).

⁵ Iser, The Act of Reading (originally published in German as Der Act Des Lesens: Theorie asthetischer Wirkung [Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1976]).

⁶ Consider, for example, the opening sentences of Fay Weldon's novel, Female Friends: "Understand, and forgive. It is what my mother taught me to do, poor patient gentle Christian soul, and the discipline she herself practised, and the reason she died in poverty, alone and neglected" (Female Friends [London: Picador Books, 1977], p. 5). The first sentence would appear to be an injunction to "understand and forgive." But who should understand and forgive? Who is speaking these words? In what context are these admonitions meant? The following sentence answers these questions to some degree: the first-person narrator is the "speaker" of these words; they are precepts taught her by her mother. But it also asks another question: why are they the reason she "died in poverty, alone and neglected"? Obviously, we'll have to read on to find out. Perhaps the next sentence will answer this question, perhaps it will defer the answer until later, perhaps by saying nothing more about it in the following sentences the text will leave it to us to infer some causal relationship between her mother's philosophy of understanding and forgiving and her death. The last sentence of this very short chapter (only a few paragraphs) reads: "Such were Chloe's thoughts before she slept." Aha! Someone named Chloe "thought" what we have just read and she did so before going to sleep. Our understanding of all that we have read to this point is retrospectively altered by the information contained in this sentence. The blank paper at the bottom of that first page signals us to turn the page in the hope of discovering more about Chloe: Why is she thinking about her mother's precepts and death? And so forth. This question/answer/question chain continues throughout the novel.

⁷ The above discussion of Iser's theory of the reading act is largely based on chapter 5 of The Act of Reading, "Grasping a Text."

⁸ Iser, The Act of Reading, pp. 191-92.

⁹ Ibid., p. 192.

¹⁰ W. Daniel Wilson, "Readers in Texts," PMLA 96, no. 5 (October 1981): 848-63.

¹¹ Umberto Eco, The Role of the Reader (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1977), p. 7.

¹² Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 138.

¹³ At the beginning of chapter 4, the narrator addresses the reader: "I know there are readers in the world, as well as many other good people in it, who are no readers at all—who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last, of everything which concerns you." He then goes on for a few paragraphs as to the kind of background information the reader might desire to have at the beginning of a personal history. The narrator then says:

To such, however, as do not choose to go so far back into these things, I can give no better advice than that they skip over the remaining part of this Chapter; for I declare beforehand, 'tis wrote only for the curious and inquisitive.

—Shut the door.—

I was begot in the night, betwixt the first Sunday and the first Monday in the month of March . . . (Lawrence Sterne, Tristram Shandy [New York; New American Library Edition, 1962], p. 12).

Note that the relationship between this characterized reader and what we might presume to be the implied reader is left unclear and that as "real" readers we're not sure whether or not we want to be identified as the "reader" the narrator addresses. Are we among those readers "who find themselves ill at ease, unless they are let into the whole secret from first to last"? We are then forced to choose what kind of reader we are; we can take the narrator's advice and "shut the door" on the rest of the chapter, or we can align ourselves with the "curious and inquisitive" and read on.

¹⁴ Michele Hilmes discusses the "direct address" quality of television in "The Television Apparatus: Direct Address," Journal of Film and Video 37, no. 4 (Fall 1985): 27-36.

¹⁵ Robert Stam, "Television News and Its Spectator," in Regarding Television—Critical Approaches: An Anthology, ed. E. Ann Kaplan, American Film Institute Monograph Series, vol. 2 (Frederick, Md.: University Publications of America, 1983), p. 39.

¹⁶ Culler, The Pursuit of Signs, p. 50.

¹⁷ Holub, Reception Theory, pp. 100-101; Eagleton, Literary Theory, pp. 78-85.

¹⁸ Eagleton, Literary Theory, pp. 84-85.

¹⁹ Norman Holland, 5 Readers Reading (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1975), pp. 28-29.

²⁰ Ray, Literary Meaning, pp. 67-68.

²¹ Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 335.

²² Ibid., chapter 14.

²³ Ibid., p. 370.

²⁴ Culler, The Pursuit of Signs, p. 53.

²⁵ Robert C. Allen, Speaking of Soap Operas (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), pp. 11-18.

²⁶ Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? pp. 109-10.

²⁷ Tony Bennett, "Text and Social Process: The Case of James Bond," Screen Education 41 (Winter/Spring 1982): 9.

²⁸ Ibid., pp. 9-14.

²⁹ The following discussion of the made-for-TV movie is based largely on Laurie Jane Schulze, "Text/Context/Cultural Activation: The Case of the Made-for-Television Movie," M.A. thesis, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1985.

³⁰ Ibid., pp. 95-103.

³¹ Ibid., p. 171.

³² Bennett, "Text and Social Process," p. 14.

³³ Raymond Williams, Television: Technology and Cultural Form (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), p. 90.